Closes the recursive-grounding gap fox surfaced today: aborist
tends Wikipedia trees but never grafts its own past Q&A records
into the forest. Each query starts from cold corpus retrieval;
prior providence_cache records sit unread until the same question
is re-asked (cache_key match). The "kindergarten thought chains"
framing names the gap — the system has a kindergarten of thoughts
(early STRICT records) that should mature into citable substrate
as they cool.
This commit lands the MVP — STRICT live providence records past
the kindergarten window become substrate via a new Source
subclass. Trust model per fox: "we trust strict statements as
fact unless a verifier falsifies it."
NEW
---
- docs/self-reference-thought-chains-design.md — full architecture
doc covering the four iteration-time gates, the recursive Merkle
proof story (Q2 → Q1 → Wikipedia chunk per v9.8's recursive-
cores insight), the falsification trust model (state=live as the
fail-closed gate), risks (lazy-anchor compounding, echo chambers,
storage bloat), and bench-impact estimate.
- aborist/sources/providence.py — ProvidenceSource(Source) with
four hard gates:
1. audit_mode == 'STRICT' (HYBRID/UNGROUNDED stay opaque)
2. falsification_state == 'live' (failed/stale/quarantined
excluded — verifier-falsification mechanism per fox)
3. now - created_at >= kindergarten_seconds (default 1h —
fresh thoughts cool first; kills tight echo loops)
4. anti-recursion: records whose answer text contains a
self-reference URI are skipped — first-generation only
- tests/test_providence_source.py — 10 unit tests covering each
gate plus the URI-scheme source-role classifier
- Makefile target `ingest-self-providence` (KG_SECONDS=3600
default; iterates each shard and self-promotes its STRICT live
records — cross-shard sharing happens via the existing
shards-dir UNION at retrieval time)
WIRE-UP
-------
- aborist/qa/query.py
- SOURCE_ROLE_BUDGET_WEIGHTS: self_reference_source = 1.0
(same as background — Wikipedia stays canonical primary;
self-reference is supplementary anchoring)
- SOURCE_ROLE_RANK_WEIGHTS: self_reference_source = 0.9
- _classify_source_role: short-circuits on aborist://providence/
URI prefix → self_reference_source regardless of title shape
- DEFAULT_QUERY_POLICY['claim_lattice_allowed_source_roles']
+= 'self_reference_source'
- aborist/qa/runner.py — same allowlist update for the
per-document `ask` path
- aborist/cli.py — `aborist ingest --source providence` reads the
providence_cache from the same shard it writes into;
--kindergarten-seconds flag plumbed through
NOT IN THIS COMMIT
------------------
- Aggregation of multiple Q&A records into synthesized summary
records (follow-on)
- Self-reference for HYBRID records (only STRICT is substrate
today; HYBRID could land later as a soft-anchor role with
lower trust)
- Live virtual sourcing (the design discusses it; MVP uses
snapshot ingestion so existing FTS / chunker / Merkle apply
with zero schema change)
- A live bench validating actual lift on self-reference questions
(requires running ingest-self-providence then bench; deferred
to follow-on commit on real data)
10 new unit tests pass; full suite at 482 passed / 21 skipped
(live fixtures gated).
